Bioinfomatics for Mouse Phenotype Analysis

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Tennessee Mouse Genome Consortium (TMGC) is a distributed regional collaboration focused on promoting the mouse as a model system for biomedical research. The TMGC leverages the large-scale mouse mutagenesis, phenotype analysis facilities and research expertise at seven participating research institutions. Researchers across this consortium can perform detailed analysis of a wide variety of phenotypes that can include behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, neuroscience, development, cardiovascular systems, reproduction, metabolism, immunology, molecular phenotype of gene expression, aging, cancer and many other areas of biomedical interest. The generation of large amounts of data at various collaborating sites in the TMGC, as well as the need to share information, analysis protocols, and track the movement of mice and biological materials across the consortium, creates a need for a shared TMGC informatics infrastructure. There is also a need for new computational biology research and resources to make best use of this data. There is a corresponding need for education and inter-disciplinary training to utilize shared informatics tools and resources to exploit the expected volume of genotype and phenotype data. The purpose of this project is to begin a process that creates the computational, informational and educational resources needed to support the TMGC?s growth towards one of the NIH?s National Program of Excellence in Biomedical Computing, a proposed Program for the Comparative and Computational Analysis of Mammalian Phenotype (PCCAMP). Education and planning components proposed include: (a) Planning workshops to bring together experimental and computational scientists to evaluate the future directions and computational requirements for comparative mammalian phenotype analysis, (b) educational workshops, and (c) the development of software-based tutorials to develop the core expertise needed within the TMGC to meet the many bioinformatics and computational biology challenges. Informatics tools and systems will be piloted in three small Development Projects: (1) The first Project will provide collaborative information management databases. These databases will accumulate and integrate observations from a network of researchers and automate the experimental and computational processing of large phenotype data sets. (2) The second pilot project will evaluate shared analysis tools needs of the TMGC and establish an environment for collaborative development and application of computational analysis software tools. (3) The third pilot project will explore interoperation and data mining issues related to TMGC phenotype data sets and their use with other available phenotype and genotype data.